To me, the “play-dumb” thing is all about marketing. It’s very similar in substance and execution to professional wrestling (hence Jesse Ventura).

The Max Headroom-Mitt Romney resemblance is uncanny.

You’re not cynical enough. You clearly realize that “acting dumb” is fairly normal behavior in many areas of life. Why wouldn’t politicians do it? John Kerry, who was as bad a student in college as Bush, went to great lengths to throw off the perception that he was a French-speaking, wine-loving, anti-hunting Massachusetts liberal. He knew he couldn’t win the election unless he changed his reputation.

‘You’d think one or two would try flashing a little intellectual ankle just to stand out from the crowd.’

To get whose vote? To a large extent Ron Paul has done this in the debates, and the main effect has been that he’s won the eternal enmity of the anti-intellectual, but influential, folks at Fox News. He may have gained himself some supporters, but not the ones who would win him a Republican primary. He’s probably ensured that he’ll have to run as a third-party candidate, if at all.

‘The country is in grave danger’

Not that our post-national elites care. They’ll do just fine under the plutocratic world government they’re trying to create. (I don’t want to be nasty, but also want to tell the truth as I see it.)

Well, certainly they do know the difference. However, the GOP self-consciously views itself as the “stupid party”. It prizes leaders who share their resentment of those eggheads at left-wing universities, together with the Europeans who are similarly opposed to American unilateralism.

–johnsavage

So the mental process goes like this:

“The country is in grave danger, but if the rubes thought I actually could tell one sand n*****r from another, they’d think I was a pointy-headed intellectual, so I’ll play dumb.”

So johnsavage thinks these guys are acting dumb, like a bunch of teenage girls who are afraid if they get A’s they won’t get dates, or black students who talk Ebonics and fail math so they won’t be seen as “acting white.”

He may have a point when it comes to W. I went to Andover a few years before W, and I can’t remember a soul there who said “nucular” or “athaletic” or “sheeit fahr.” Ruthless adolescent mockery wouid have eliminated such locutions in short order. What’s more, you had to read and at a minimum, regurgitate, even to get C’s. Years of substance abuse and sinecures could have rotted his brain, I suppose, or W could be chopping weeds and saying “nucular” to appease the rubes.

It’s a little harder to believe, though, that all the rest of the pack went to the same clown school as W. You’d think one or two would try flashing a little intellectual ankle just to stand out from the crowd.

“Perhaps this opinion is supercilious and pedantic, but if there is an existential threat from various Islamic quarters, it would be nice of our would-be leaders knew a Sufi from a Shi’ite.”

Well, certainly they do know the difference. However, the GOP self-consciously views itself as the “stupid party”. It prizes leaders who share their resentment of those eggheads at left-wing universities, together with the Europeans who are similarly opposed to American unilateralism. Karl Rove, who is obviously no fool, allows Bush to continue speaking of “nucular” weapons ad infinitum, among other obvious and less obvious errors. Obviously this is a well-planned tactical move in which Bush shows his solidarity with the less-educated. Only an elitist (it is believed) would dare call attention to the President’s lack of command of the English language. Smart Republicans can see Bush’s bluff, but they actually vote Republican based on real policies, rather than gestures that supposedly show where a candidate stands in the Culture War.

The equivalent to this ignorance would have been a politician in 1948 who got exercised about the threat of communism but couldn’t tell a social democrat from a Trotskyist from Stalin. When Labor’s Clement Attlee defeated Churchill, we could have invaded Britain, which is more less equivalent to taking out Saddam, and taking responsibility for Iraq, to defeat bin Ladin.

There are genuine jihadi and demographic threats from the Islamic world. These candidates seem ignorant about the adversary, and their invincible ignorance is such that they seem not to feel the need to hire people who do have a bit of knowledge on the subject.

I really believe we should withdraw and then do our best to keep the jihadist threat “over there”. Yet none of the “respectable” major-party candidates wants to make politically incorrect statements about Islam, so they have to appeal to voters’ latent insecurity about what could happen if almost all 1,000,000,000+ Muslims are ready to die in a great crusade against the Evil Hollywoodized Colossus. Many certainly would prefer to die rather than see their countries succumb to American culture.

You know, Tom Tancredo expresses some of the same feelings about Islam in a more forthright manner, and comes across as the type of Cassandra that the average American will never tolerate, sad to say.

As the old Pennsylvania Dutch tourist trinkets used to say, “Ve get too soon ouldt, und too late schmardt.”